Posts in Category: ceo

I strongly believe in the power of the right people in the right place. For a startup, this makes the difference between life and death. While there aren’t two startups alike, the things I will talk about in this article apply to all of them.

I was fortunate enough to learn a lot of things the hard way and I want to share them with both early entrepreneurs and people who are wasting their potential instead of joining a startup.

Yes, I love interviewing interns. I’ve met people who were less than impressed about this fact, claiming that I was losing valuable time because interviewing interns is very straightforward. I strongly disagree, I find it somehow more challenging to discuss with a student than with an experienced senior executive. I’ve learned a lot from these interviews and I will never stop meeting interns before they join our team.

This article is dedicated to our interns and comes with hands-on advice that you might find useful before your first day at 4PSA.

My article Why Tesla Must Get Back To Edison that was featured on LinkedIn Editor’s Picks attracted a lot of comments. I wish to thank every reader and commenter. While at first I wanted to answer each comment personally, I discovered that many comments required an extensive and very similar answer, therefore I decided to write this article.

Immediately after Tesla released Tesla Powerwall, the Internet was flooded with lots of articles discussing the real pricing of the new Tesla product. You do not have to be a genius to notice that Powerwall is not economically efficient. Even the economics behind lead acid batteries based systems is debatable, although these batteries cost three times less than the Li-Ion batteries used by Tesla.

There is a lot of debate regarding crypto currency – some think it is the future of money, others strongly disagree, and the debate does not seem to come to an end. I personally have a fundamental problem with them. I was tempted a couple of times to try to solve the problem myself, but I doubt that I will have the time and focus to do it. Maybe someone can pick it up from here.

This is a video we’ve shot two weeks ago about VoipNow Mobile. Please excuse my performance 🙂 VoipNow Mobile is at the beginning of its life, there is still much to do and we know it. But at the end of the day, we want our partners to be able to deploy their infrastructure on over 90% BYOD.

Why? Traditionally, BYOD is associated with high risks, poor compliance and so on. Considering the problems our customers face with business desktop IP phones, we believe that properly done BYOD can provide a better experience not only for end-users, but also for specialized IT personnel. While we do not know precisely how many support cases are associated with client issues on the service provider’s end, we know that about 20% of our support tickets contain various phone client problems, starting with provisioning and ending with illegal equipment usage. It’s a big opportunity to hunt these down.

Apparently a lot of software engineers fail to understand the importance of product management and most product managers are well aware about this. Unfortunately, most of the time, they blame the engineers’ education for the lack of vision, while in fact there is a much simpler explanation – engineers have witnessed product management failures once too many times. Truth be told, relatively few businesses value product management, even if they hire one product manager for every three engineers.

Recently, a friend asked me to talk to his son who will soon be a fresh IT graduate. His son received tempting job offers from three companies and he was kind of puzzled as to what company to choose at the start of his career.

After discussing with the young man for about ten minutes, I was a little puzzled myself, because he was not actually looking for advice, but for valid reasons not to join any of those companies.

It is so easy to distinguish an engineer (or an engineer to be) from a non-engineer. When we interview people for a software engineering position, we want to determine how much of an engineer the candidate is. That’s why we ask a fair amount of questions apparently unrelated to software. Real engineers focus on the problem, break it into pieces, and analyze them. They translate the problem into their “own words”, making analogies with common, easy-to-understand processes. Once their solution is challenged, they are able to optimize and explain it.

There is a common perception that collaboration is the universal solution to all issues that software companies encounter. A lot of effort is invested in improving collaboration between tech people, starting from tools that can be easily purchased and ending with programs that encourage collaborative behavior. The idea is quite simple: if people collaborate better, the output of the entire team, both its quality and quantity, will be better.

While I do not want to mitigate against collaboration, there are specific cases where it simply doesn’t work. I will exemplify that and suggest some solutions as well.